The average office worker types at around 40 words per minute. A proficient touch typist manages 70–90 WPM. Competitive typists regularly exceed 120 WPM. The gap between the first group and the second is not talent — it is technique, combined with the right kind of practice.
If you spend even four hours a day at a keyboard, the difference between typing at 45 WPM and 75 WPM translates to over an hour of recaptured time every single day. Over a working year, that is weeks. The return on investment for improving your typing speed is unusually high for a one-time skill investment.
Here is exactly how to improve — not just "practice more", but specifically what to change.
1. Fix Your Foundation: Learn Proper Touch Typing
Most self-taught typists have the same set of ingrained bad habits: glancing at the keyboard, using three or four fingers instead of all ten, and inconsistent finger-key assignments. These habits create a hard ceiling. You can reach 50–60 WPM on instinct, but you will plateau there regardless of how much you practise.
Touch typing means: every finger has assigned keys, your eyes stay on the screen at all times, and muscle memory handles the mechanics. The home row is the foundation — your left hand rests on A, S, D, F, and your right hand on J, K, L, and semicolon. Every finger returns to home row between keystrokes.
The hard truth is that relearning this will slow you down for two to three weeks. You will feel like you are going backwards. That regression is a necessary investment. Push through it, and the ceiling lifts permanently. Most people who commit to it see their speed surpass their old plateau within four to six weeks.
2. Sort Out Your Posture and Wrist Position
Typing with bent or raised wrists does more than cause discomfort — it mechanically restricts finger movement and reduces speed. Proper ergonomics: forearms roughly parallel to the floor or angled slightly downward, wrists neutral or slightly extended (not bent upward), fingers curved naturally over the keys.
If you're working on a laptop placed flat on a desk, the keyboard angle is almost certainly wrong for sustained typing. An external keyboard positioned at the right height makes a meaningful difference in both speed and long-term injury prevention.
3. Practise Deliberately, Not Just Frequently
There is a meaningful difference between typing a lot and practising typing. Answering emails for eight hours does not improve your WPM the same way focused practice does. Deliberate practice means working at the edge of your current ability — slightly faster or harder than comfortable — with immediate feedback and focused repetition of your weak areas.
In practice: 10–15 minute focused sessions are more effective than 60-minute casual ones. Identify the specific keys and key combinations that slow you down and drill those specifically. Common weak spots are numbers, symbols, punctuation, and the letter combinations that require stretching — Q, Z, P, and keys requiring pinky-finger reach.
4. Prioritise Accuracy Over Raw Speed
This is the counterintuitive one. If you type at 80 WPM with 85% accuracy, your effective output is closer to 68 WPM — because you're backspacing and correcting constantly. That backspacing also breaks your flow and slows your net rate further than the numbers suggest.
Target 95% accuracy or above before you try to push speed. At that level, corrections are rare enough that they don't significantly disrupt pace. Once accuracy is solid, speed increases naturally with practice — the reverse does not hold true as well.
5. Drill Word Lists, Not Just Sentences
Practice passages and famous quotes test your ability to read and type simultaneously, which mixes two skills. For raw speed improvement in the motor skill itself, drilling common word lists is more efficient. The 200 most common English words account for roughly 65% of all written text. Building fluency on those words first makes an outsized difference in everyday typing speed.
Once you have solid fundamentals, move on to varied content: code, numbers, special characters, and punctuation. These are where most typists are weakest, and if your daily work involves writing code or entering data, targeted practice on those character types gives a disproportionate return.
6. Track Your Progress
Improvement without measurement becomes invisible — which means motivation evaporates. Logging your WPM and accuracy over time gives you the data to see that you were at 44 WPM three weeks ago and are now at 58 WPM. That number is motivating in a way that vague effort is not.
Set a specific target WPM and a timeline. "I want to reach 70 WPM in 8 weeks, practising 15 minutes a day" is a goal. "I want to type faster" is a wish. The former is achievable; the latter isn't measurable.
How Long Does It Take?
Starting from a typical self-taught 40–50 WPM baseline, consistent deliberate practice of 15 minutes a day typically yields:
- 4 weeks: Initial plateau broken; proper touch typing feels more natural
- 8 weeks: 60–70 WPM common; accuracy above 95%
- 3–6 months: 80–100 WPM for motivated learners
Beyond 100 WPM, gains require more specialised practice, but for most knowledge workers, 80 WPM with high accuracy is the practical goal — and it is entirely achievable in a few months of consistent work.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good typing speed in WPM?
For general office work, 60-70 WPM with high accuracy is considered proficient. The average office worker types around 40 WPM. Professional typists typically reach 70-90 WPM. For most knowledge workers -- developers, writers, analysts -- 80 WPM with 95%+ accuracy is the practical target that delivers meaningful daily time savings.
How long does it take to learn proper touch typing from scratch?
Most self-taught typists learn touch typing fundamentals in 2-4 weeks, though you will type slower than your previous method during this period. Surpassing your old speed typically takes 4-6 weeks of consistent 15-minute daily sessions. Reaching 70+ WPM from a low baseline typically takes 3-6 months of deliberate practice.
Is it worth switching to the Dvorak or Colemak keyboard layout?
For most people, no. The efficiency gains of alternative layouts are real but modest -- estimated at 5-15% faster theoretical speed due to reduced finger travel. The learning cost is significant: three to six months of reduced productivity. Unless you have RSI concerns or are starting completely from scratch, optimising touch typing on QWERTY delivers better returns in less time.
Does the type of keyboard affect typing speed?
Yes, meaningfully. Mechanical keyboards with tactile or clicky switches provide physical feedback that helps with accuracy and reduces error rates. Key travel distance and actuation force also affect comfort and speed. That said, keyboard choice matters far less than technique -- the best keyboard is whichever one you practice on consistently enough to build muscle memory.
Can typing speed be improved at any age?
Yes. Motor skill learning remains possible well into adulthood and beyond. The principles of deliberate practice -- focused sessions, targeted weak-spot drilling, and progress tracking -- apply regardless of age. Adults often progress more efficiently than children in the early stages because they can apply conscious technique more precisely.
Should I use a typing tutor app or just practice through normal work?
Both -- but in sequence. A structured typing tutor is essential for the first 4-8 weeks to establish correct technique and build proper muscle memory for all keys, especially weaker fingers. Once fundamentals are solid, practicing through real work accelerates contextual fluency. Starting with only real work reinforces existing bad habits rather than replacing them.
References
- Dhakal A, et al. (2018). Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM.
- Ericsson KA, Krampe RT, Tesch-Romer C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363-406.
- Logan GD. (1999). Automaticity and cognitive control. In Uleman JS and Bargh JA (Eds.), Unintended Thought. Guilford Press.
